Cumulative song

A cumulative song is a song whose verses are built from earlier verses, usually by adding a new stanza to the previous verse. A simple cumulative song having n verses is structured as

stanza₁

stanza₂ stanza₁

⋮

stanza_n stanza_n-1 … stanza₁

or

stanza₁

stanza₁ stanza₂

⋮

stanza₁ stanza₂ … stanza_n

sometimes with a common chorus included with each verse. When sung, the repeated stanzas are sometimes varied or abbreviated.

Cumulative songs are popular for group singing, in part because they require relatively little memorization of lyrics, and because remembering the previous verse to concatenate it to form the current verse can become a kind of game.

Examples of cumulative songs

• "The Twelve Days of Christmas"
• "Green Grow the Rushes, O"
• "I Am a Fine Musician" from 2 episodes of the Dick Van Dyke Show
• "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly"
• "Old McDonald Had a Farm"
• "Alouette"
• "Eh, Cumpari!"
• "I Have a Song to Sing, O" from Gilbert & Sullivan's operetta The Yeomen of the Guard
• "Children, go where I send thee"
• "I Bought Me A Cat"
• "The Green Grass Grew All Around"
• "Song of Love" from the musical Once Upon a Mattress
• "The Rattlin' Bog"
• "The Barley Mow"
• "There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea" [1]
• "Du Hast" is partially cumulative, and is a fairly popular German industrial song, making its cumulative parts somewhat novel.
• "The Court of King Caractacus" by Rolf Harris
• "The Schnitzelbank Song"
• "Must Be Santa", a Christmas song popularized by Mitch Miller
• "Don't Be Anything Less Than Anything You Can Be" from the musical Snoopy
• "Getta Loada Toad" from the musical A Year with Frog and Toad
• "Minkurinn í hænsnakofanum", an Icelandic song about farm animals waking each other when a mink storms the chicken pen.
• 'Herring's Heads', sung by Johnny Doughty on Voice of the People vol 07
• 'My Cock Crew', sung by Con Greaney on 'Traditional Singer'
• 'Old King Cole', sung by Martin Gorman on Voice of the People vol 07
• "Widdecombe Fair" (also 'Widecombe' or 'Widdlecombe Fair (Caister Norfolk)', also known as Tam Pierce), sung by Tom Brown on Voice of the People vol 07
• 'Most Beautiful Leg of the Mallard', sung by Henry Mitchelmore on Voice of the People vol 07

Examples of cumulative songs in Judaism

Yiddish folk music contains many prominent examples of cumulative songs, including "?װאָס װעט זײַן אַז משיח װעט קומען" and "מה אספּרה," or "What Will Happen When the Messiah Comes?" and "Who Can Recall" (a Yiddish version of the Passover song "Echad mi yode'a").

The Passover seder contains two cumulative songs: Echad mi yode'a and Chad Gadya.

See also

• Cumulative tale
• Announcer's test
• Round (music)
• The Complexity of Songs